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Usenet is nice. I can recomment comp.misc, a nice, active group with some activity there:-)
(For Slashdot and Soylentnews I'm actually only guessing. An nmap probe reveals an F5 load balancer for slashdot and a probably a Linux-Box for soylentnews.org.)
BTW: I hope slashdot will keep it's classic forum software, would like to remain a regular here:-)

Thanks for info! Lets see... I'm curious as well, but will probably stick around here as well. If they reach functional parity with their new software before making it default, I won't see a reason to abandon ship.

Suit yourself:-) I spend 40h a week on my job, and if someone proposes a job doubling my salary, I will take that offer. But while I'm in this office, my performance depends heavily on feeling comfortable in my current environment. If you find all the time you need to master new subjects in your spare time, good for you. My spare time is mainly for my family, and I'm very happy I find enough challenges in my job so I don't need extensive hobbies for that.

They are speaking about healthy aged people, which probably excludes most physical damages or degenerating diseases. And no, intelligence can not be measured in a reasonable way. Practicing typical IQ test tasks will increase your achievements there while this "brain-jogging" does not improve your capabilities to solve differently structured problems.

I accept there is a correlation between test results and perceived IQ, but since the very definition of intelligence is already controversial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence#Definitions) and tests are probably applied most of the time to measure younger people (career planning etc.), and also the time spent on a single test is very limited, it seems quite conceivable to me that some people might be good at solving more complex real live (common sense: display higher intelligence) while they suck at short tasks. From personal experience (older colleagues) I'd say there is a bias towards this type of people in older people.

Why was this modded down? Science of a Discworld is a book mainly dealing with the real science of our world from a fresh perspective, a book I would recommend to anyone interested in science on a bit broader scale, although it obviously can't go into the same depth as pure science books focused on single topics.

In a final real-world test, Koza chose a filter circuit to solve a design problem that a scholarly engineering journal had deemed too difficult to solve. "The tenth-order elliptic asymmetric bandpass filter was touted as being difficult to design, but we were easily able to solve it," Koza said.

To be fair, Koza did have to double the size of the population used to evolve a bandpass filter-up to 640,000 circuits-thereby multiplying the time it took the computer to evolve a "best" circuit. He had to devise a more extensive fitness measure by which the members of the evolving population were measured against one another. The problem took four days to run, on a 64-CPU parallel processor.

This article is from 1996, so I guess the same algorithm would be even faster now.

Not always true. I can't find the link right now, but in Science of the Discworld, Terry Pratchett references a work where a bandpass filter was designed using genetic algorithms, and used less elements while working better than straight forward designed circuits. What's more, there are some apparently void elements in the circuit, but still the circuit stops working when these elements are removed.
I wasn't able to find the work in a hurry, but while looking for it I got the impression there seems to be a lot of work ongoing related to frequency filters and GA.

SailfishOS has an Android runtime, so Android apps should run on the device. They also plan to provide images compatible with standard Android hardware, claiming that e.g. in the Chinese market it is common for users to pimp their phones with custom roms. So, I might wait for first reviews on how well the compatibility-layer works, but if it works I wouldn't be concerned about lack of apps.

They intend to increase Sailfish market share by making the OS easily available for Android phones. I'd guess if you flash it to an Android device with support for 1700MHz, it should work. Actually I'm waiting for a list of cheap Android devices capable of running Sailfish.